Urban Land Magazine » Robert Dunphyhttp://urbanland.uli.org
Thu, 30 Jul 2015 16:15:47 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Toll Roads: A Problem or a Solution?http://urbanland.uli.org/infrastructure-transit/toll-roads-problem-solution/
http://urbanland.uli.org/infrastructure-transit/toll-roads-problem-solution/#commentsThu, 28 May 2015 14:45:18 +0000http://urbanland.uli.org/?p=27368A consensus exists among public officials that significant investment is needed to improve U.S. highway and transit systems. Are toll roads a viable source of funding?

Central Florida’s extensive highway network includes five toll roads, with a sixth one planned. (Thomas Barrat)

Toll roads represent an old idea made new. Turnpikes, a term taken from a barrier used to block access to a road until a toll was paid, were used in colonial America to improve surface transportation between cities when traveling overland was a difficult alternative to more efficient and comfortable water routes.

As federal funding for highways became widely available, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 imposed a ban on tolls for roads constructed with federal funding. A 1938 study by the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, “Toll Roads and Free Roads,” considered the possibility of financing a national highway system with tolls, deciding it was not feasible at the time. The Interstate Highway System, created by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, offered toll-free roads financed by a federal tax on gasoline, credited to the newly established Highway Trust Fund.

About a quarter century ago, a new generation of toll roads began as the interstate system was built out, federal gas tax revenues stagnated, and private investment, especially from international funds, became available for such projects. Blockbuster projects included the Indiana Toll Road, built by the public in the 1950s and leased to a partnership of Spanish construction firm Cintra and Australian toll road operator Macquarie in 2006 for $3.8 billion, and the Chicago Skyway, leased to the same firms in 2004 for $1.8 billion.

The U.S. experience has been mirrored elsewhere. During the 1990s, according to the World Bank, developing countries increasingly turned to the private sector for construction, management, and maintenance of toll roads. Between 1990 and 1999, $61 billion in private investment was committed to 279 projects in 26 developing countries, comprising 21,355 miles (34,368 km) of toll highways, bridges, and tunnels, the World Bank reports.

But recently significant problems have arisen for some high-profile toll roads: some members of the public are having growing concerns about allowing private interests to profit from tolls on ordinary citizens, as well as expressing fear that state transportation bureaucrats might be bamboozled by Wall Street sharks. These concerns are being borne out in the following cases:

California’s San Joaquin Hills toll road—which has consistently fallen below its ridership and revenue projections, threatening its ability to keep up with debt payments—is restructuring at least half the $2.2 billion in bonds sold to build the highway.

The ITR Commission, the partnership of Cintra and Macquarie that paid $3.8 billion in 2006 to operate the Indiana Toll Road for 75 years, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2014, reigniting debate about the merits of privatizing roads.

Amid growing backlash against toll roads, Texas voters approved a constitutional amendment in November 2014 by a landslide 4–1 margin to give the Texas Department of Transportation (DOT) about $1.7 billion a year in additional funding—with the caveat that the new money not be used on toll projects.

Toll roads are a niche product in the United States: revenue from tolls accounts for only about 5 percent of spending on major highways. This is a stark contrast with nations such as France, where the majority of motorways now carry tolls. A few state departments of transportation, however, are already demonstrating that tolls are acceptable to the public—if the tolled roads add significantly to road capacity. In the 14 states with major toll road expansion programs, tolls are already funding more than 10 percent of urban expressway miles; in the large and fast-growing states that have a great need for new road capacity, such as Texas and Florida, tolls are funding more than 25 percent of new capacity.

In addition, the private sector’s role in investment and development is increasing. More than 10 percent of the toll roads developed since 1992 have involved private investment; this is particularly the case with greenfield projects. Wisconsin, which has no toll roads now but is facing enormous shortfalls in transportation funding, is planning a study of possible tolls—something former Democratic Governor Jim Doyle once said would happen “over my dead body.” Incumbent Governor Scott Walker, who says he is not a fan of tolls, has allowed this study to go forward. A November 18, 2014, article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says a planned toll study would gather odometer readings when people register their vehicles each year, a possible move toward a fee based on how many miles people drive—a tax on vehicle-miles traveled is widely admired by transportation professionals as broader and more equitable than tolls because it would apply to all roads.

Tolling the Interstate Highway System is the holy grail of financing options for transportation officials because it would open up potentially thousands of new miles to tolling with little political effort on their part. A 2014 Congressional Research Service study, “Tolling U.S. Highways,” estimated that tolling the untolled urban interstates at rates that approximate the current averages for tolled interstate facilities might produce $37 billion in annual revenue, nearly as much as the Highway Trust Fund now receives from motor fuel taxes.

This, in turn, has the potential to leverage considerably greater investment, allowing states to spend these additional revenues to improve other key interregional highways, and possibly transit as well.

In the Dallas region, an area where toll road development is pervasive, the Wall Street Journal in October 2014 noted a backlash to conversion of part of U.S. Highway 75, a major north–south artery, to tolls. It also reported opposition to development of a new toll road northeast of Dallas by a private company, which would make it the only road in the United States fully built, owned, and operated by a private company. That private company, the Texas Turnpike Corporation, even has the power of eminent domain to seize land.

Inspired by the reaction, the state Republican Party amended its platform last year to add language hostile to toll roads. “A large segment of our party believes in having free access to transportation,” Steve Munisteri, chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, told the Wall Street Journal.

A New York Times blog by Vikas Bajaj last October raised another perspective—that tolls would not be necessary if Texas had raised the gasoline tax from its 1991 levels. Another perspective comes from Tea Party activists, for whom toll roads represent a government power grab.

What is the public’s view? A survey last year of 1,503 Americans by the Mineta Transportation Institute in San Jose, California, showed that a majority of people would support higher taxes for transportation if the use of the revenue were properly explained.

A gasoline tax increase of 10 cents per gallon was supported by 69 percent of respondents, while a mileage tax, similar to a trip-specific toll, was supported by 43 percent, on the condition that the toll would vary according to the vehicle’s level of pollution.

And support for a mileage tax varying by the vehicle’s pollution level has grown over succeeding years of the survey, from 33 percent in 2009 to 43 percent in 2014.

Toll roads typically are a one-time fix in most regions. However, places where tolls are central to development and growth plans—such as central Florida and Dallas—take a different approach.

Central Florida, a multicounty area around Orlando, has an extensive highway network extending 108 miles (174 km) that includes five toll roads, with a sixth planned. The Florida Department of Transportation’s District 5 in central Florida accounts for more than 40 percent of all toll roads in the state, and nearly two-thirds of highway travel in Orange County, the central county of the region, and neighboring Osceola County is on toll roads.

For one of the most tolled regions in the United States, the effect of toll roads on travel and residential development so far seems minimal. The average amount of driving per capita is more than 30 miles (48 km) per day, second only to Houston among large regions. The average cash toll rate for the multicounty system is 15.3 cents per mile, and the average electronic toll rate is 13.4 cents per mile, comparable to rates on other toll roads in the United States.

A study on the elasticity of demand in the 2013 General Traffic and Earnings Consultant’s Annual Report of the Orlando–Orange County Expressway Authority found that the 14 percent toll increase in October 2012 resulted in only very small reductions in driving among Orlando motorists. Along the two roads that had no other changes to complicate the comparison, state routes 408 and 417, the analysts found that each 10 percent increase in toll rates had a negligible effect on traffic, reducing traffic by only 1.4 percent. In fact, two toll roads serving growth corridors, state routes 429 and 414, were excluded from the elasticity calculation because they experienced increases in traffic over the period—a modest gain of 0.7 percent on S.R. 429 and a robust 13.7 percent on S.R. 414—despite the toll increase, reflecting underlying traffic growth due to new development.

(leungchopan)

Effects on Sprawl

With limited funds available in Florida for construction and maintenance, it is expected that more roads will be financed through user fees or tolls. However, planners worry that toll roads could lead to perpetuation of the sprawling patterns that most citizens dislike.

Research on toll roads in Tampa by Sisinnio Concas, a professor at the University of South Florida’s Center for Urban Transportation Research, found that the improved access delivered by new toll roads to neighborhoods in the suburbs of Tampa and Miami increased land and property prices in both areas by about 5 percent. So the increased cost of driving was more than compensated for by the additional access to the affected neighborhoods.

The Orlando region metropolitan planning organization MetroPlan has been working with a leadership group called myregion.com, which undertook a regional growth visioning project called “How Shall We Grow?” that involved a large number of residents, officials, and civic and business leaders. The project resulted in a call for the redirection of the current pattern of land use and automobile dependence, which they thought was unsustainable for the future of central Florida.

Instead, they preferred a sustainable land use forecast for 2040 developed by MetroPlan that they said will demonstrate an environment with less driving, reduced suburban sprawl, and greater use of the new regional rail system. The forecast, incorporated into the regional transportation plan by MetroPlan, emphasizes compact development along corridors, infill development and redevelopment, mixed land uses, an improved jobs-to-housing balance within compact radiuses for urban travel, and development patterns that support multimodal transportation. Planned road expansion, accomplished primarily with toll roads, makes such roads part of the region’s sustainability vision.

In Texas, the North Texas Tollway Authority operates 111 miles (179 km) of toll roads, covering four roads, two bridges, and one tunnel. In 2013, the last full year of reporting, annual traffic on these roads totaled 610 million vehicles and revenues were $525 million, generated by an average toll of 83 cents per trip.

Reliance on toll roads has been in­creasing for decades as the gasoline tax was stuck at 1991 levels—in terms of cents per gallon, not percentage—in Texas and nationally, thanks to Congress having kept the federal gas tax unchanged. In 2010, the North Central Texas Council of Governments projected that the combined state and federal fuel tax and vehicle registration fee collected in Texas would decline from 2.4 cents per vehicle-mile traveled in 2009 to 1.4 cents in 2030, with the net revenue to the Texas DOT declining from 1.6 cents to 0.7 cents per mile.

Toll roads bring market demand to the process of selecting worthwhile road projects, as well as badly needed funds. States and localities need improvements to serve existing and planned travel needs. Where these two needs intersect—needed projects matched by tolls to finance them—is the sweet spot for public agencies and private investors. It is important that planners first determine the critical needs, then shop for toll funding to support them, either through private ventures or possibly through public toll agencies. That ensures that the selected facilities will serve broader goals for growth and economic development. A clear expression of priority needs may also help expand support for public funding for transportation facilities and ensure that the money is put to the best uses.

The link to development plans seems central to the smart expansion of toll roads. With federal transportation planning requirements calling for fiscal constraint, planners need to live within the revenues expected rather than the revenues they desire.

Planners at the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCG) recognized this fact in 1998. They noted in a long-term plan that year that “toll roads play a critical role in the transportation plan, both as a source of funding and added system capacity.”

Today, NCTCG planners recognize that the funding available is substantially short of what might be considered needed investment. In its Mobility 2035 plan, the region’s long-range transportation plan, and updates made in 2013, the NCTCG noted that in addition to expanding the network to accommodate growth trends, a major emphasis will be to “promote growth management strategies that strike a greater balance between land use and transportation. Programs and projects aimed at eliminating or reducing vehicle trips, shortening trips that would still occur, and utilizing the capacity of our system to its fullest are major recommendations.”

Robert T. Dunphy is a consultant and teaches in the Georgetown University Master of Professional Studies in Real Estate program. He is an emeritus fellow of ULI and the Transportation Research Board.

]]>Transportation referendums prospered in the November election, with 70 percent of those put to a vote winning. Voters approved 25 of 31 road spending measures and 13 of 19 initiatives for public transit funding, according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association and the American Public Transportation Association. Two high-profile proposals, Measure J in Los Angeles and Measure B in Alameda County, California, gained broad support, but came one percentage point shy of the two-thirds majority required for passage in the state.

The Villages at Shirlington in Arlington, Virginia. The project includesresidential space, restaurants, retail, and hotels. Within the bigger picture of public support for transit, some interesting tensions between rail and bus advocates could be found.

In Los Angeles, the measure to extend the sales tax and accelerate completion of the city’s rail system was opposed by the Bus Riders Union, which claimed that this move would come at the expense of bus riders, a position they have successfully argued in court. This opposition may have had an impact on Measure J because the loss of even one percentage point of support was enough to send it to defeat.

In Houston, a confusing ballot measure passed, extending the 1 percent sales tax that funds Houston Metro’s transit programs and allows the continued diversion of one-quarter of the revenue collected by that tax to local governments for street and road programs. An opposition group argued that killing the referendum would stop the diversion, allowing Metro to retain all funds for transit and continue the development of light rail. Houston Mayor Annise Parker called this a “flat lie” and claimed “the referendum will stop cannibalizing the bus system in order to support the light-rail lines.”

Honolulu’s mayoral race became a referendum on a controversial elevated rail system planned to run throughout the city. Former acting mayor Kirk Caldwell defeated former governor Ben Cayetano, who had emerged from retirement largely with a goal of halting the 20-mile (32 km) elevated rail project. Cayetano, who preferred buses as an alternative, argued that the rail system would be too costly and intrusive while doing little to relieve the city’s worsening traffic congestion.

One of the few major issues in the Arlington County, Virginia, race for a county board seat was a $250 million streetcar project intended to aid redevelopment of a deteriorating urban corridor, Columbia Pike. The Republican and green candidates for the office opposed it, and the incumbent Democrat, who had been on the fence, turned against it late in the race. Arlington County—favored by smart growth and transit-oriented development advocates, especially for its redevelopment of the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor—has proposed a vastly expanded transit service for Columbia Pike, preferring a streetcar-based alternative over a premium bus service that is $200 million cheaper.

The Role of Transit

Increasingly, transit is considered key to helping traditional automobile-oriented suburbs make the transition to pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use, livable communities. How big a role does it play? Wide variations in practice exist. A few examples of transit’s role—or failure to play a role—follow.

Transit is “just right.” This Goldilocks situation is probably unusual. Throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, the growth of street railways was closely tied to real estate development. Some entrepreneurs even financed money-losing streetcar systems with profits from real estate development. Among the more recent successes are such major redevelopment areas as the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor (facilitated by the presence of the Metro subway system), neighborhoods near particular stations in the San Francisco Bay area, and rail corridors in Denver, as well as a growing practice around the country of linking visions of regional growth to transit.

Transit is not enough. A site near transit is not enough, by itself, to ensure that development—or redevelopment—is a success. Ex­­amples of this include many locations near older transit, such as the Fruitvale station in West Oakland, California, and Silver Spring, Maryland. In such instances, intervention in the normal workings of the real estate market is required—through subsidies, incentives, and perhaps active redevelopment.

Silver Spring, for example, had several failed development proposals—including an inward-facing urban entertainment mall that failed to get financing—until a new county executive made redevel­­op­ment a key goal of his administration in the late 1990s. He hired a team of private developers to engage the community, eventually proposing a smaller-scale, street-based retail plan that calls for incremental development of the area—a proposal that received widespread community support, financial assistance for infrastructure improvements, and expedited permitting. The successful new town center, endorsed by a ULI Advisory Services panel, opened in 1998, two decades after Metro service began, showing that the presence of a transit station needed to be complemented by the basics of real estate and planning to create the right development.

Santana Row in San Jose, California.Transit is not necessary. Surprisingly, many of the most widely recog­­nized models of place making —especially in the suburbs—have compact, mixed-use centers with higher-density residential space, shared parking, and pleasant places to walk, but no transit. Examples include the following communities:

Belmar in Lakewood, Colorado, is organized on a street grid that emphasizes pedestrian movement, with shops oriented closely to the street, 777,000 square feet (72,000 sq m) of retail space, 868,000 square feet (81,000 sq m) of office space, 1,048 residential units, and a cinema and hotel, along with community parks and plazas. It has been a major success, but is located on the west side of Denver, where there is no rail service today. The closest station of a planned 2013 extension of the light-rail system will be about 2.5 miles (4 km) away, which will involve a 12-minute bus trip plus a long walk. The site is served by a north–south bus line that operates every 30 minutes and by east–west buses that operate every 15 to 30 minutes in the afternoon and early evening.

Santana Row in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, contains 680,000 square feet (63,000 sq m) of retail space and restaurants, 1,201 dwelling units, two hotels, and seven parks, all configured along a 1,500-foot (460 m) pedestrian-friendly main street with a central park to accommodate alfresco dining and entertainment. The site has convenient highway access, but transit service is limited to two bus routes, and it is not served by Santa Clara’s light-rail system, though that was part of the original plans. The nearest light-rail station is a 19-minute bus ride away, and local bus service operates every 30 minutes.

At the Village at Shirlington in Arlington County, Virginia, a declining retail area was replaced by a mixed-use retail center surrounded by apartments and anchored by a new county library and a nationally recognized live theater. Expansion in 1995 of a retail/entertainment center that had replaced a deteriorating suburban mall added 644 apartment and condominium units and created a vibrant main street with 42,000 square feet (3,900 sq m) of additional retail space, including a strong mix of restaurants as well as a grocery store, and 195,000 square feet (18,000 sq m) of office space. The site is served only by bus at a terminal added at the edge of the project, and service is sparse for visitors: buses connect to a Metro rail station only every half hour.

All three of these projects were developed on the sites of dead or failing retail areas with limited transit service. They demonstrate that there are many important qualities of such town centers, but light-rail service—or even bus transit—does not need to be one of them. Rather, they require the basics of planning, development, and redevelopment to create attractive places.

The Bus Rapid Transit Alternative

Though light rail and streetcar service are clearly the sexy alternatives in development of livable communities with transit, an emerging option is the bus, especially a reimagined and rebranded one. Can proponents sell the bus option to retailers and developers, who sometimes believe that “rail passengers linger, while bus passengers loiter”? A new-generation smart bus service, known increasingly as bus rapid transit (BRT)—with higher speeds, better reliability, improved passenger comforts, and substantially lower costs—is improving transit and supporting redevelopment in cities where it is adopted. Ideally, exclusive BRT lanes are included in the service so that buses are not slowed by other traffic, and the buses are given preference at traffic signals. But many projects have been successful operating in mixed traffic mode—a “BRT lite” option—allowing automobiles and BRT to share the same lane.

Will developers buy into the idea? Maybe not in Houston, where the need to engage private developers was one of the rationales for the city’s first light-rail line, which opened in 2004 on Main Street, supported by a private sector that claimed Houstonians would use the bus service that was proposed as an alternative. A similar argument was presented in Arlington County, where a streetcar is proposed to support the redevelopment of Columbia Pike. The preferred alternative of county officials includes a bus system supplemented by a few streetcar routes so that three out of four transit arrivals will be buses.

County officials argue that the streetcar alternative would best support long-term private investment in transit-friendly development because the tracks are permanent, which inspires confidence among developers that the routes will not change the way bus routes do—an opinion based on the common misconception that a few opponents at a public hearing are usually enough to change a transit agency’s hard heart.

More important, it is the basics of the vision for development adopted by government officials that will get developers to commit. That vision includes the pedestrian-friendly street plan, the mix of uses, the presence of high-density residential space, the management of parking, and the overall appeal of the place. If the supporting transit is fully integrated into the development plan, functionally and financially, it should not matter if the service is bus or rail—even in Houston.

]]>Whereas many states had difficulty with the requirement by the federal transportation stimulus program in 2009that projects be “shovel ready,” the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) was able to commit almost $600 million to 15 projects for Florida’s major regions within the tight deadline. These investments will play a significant role in addressing existing traffic congestion and the lack of connectivity while increasing travel options and helping those regions accommodate the significant growth expected. Three of these projects will leverage federal funds with ongoing state and private sector project funding for an additional $1 billion.

This result contrasts with the experience of other states, where most projects funded through the stimulus program paid for short-term improvements, highway re­­pairs, and bus purchases rather than long-term investments. This was a consequence of the federal program’s obligation deadlines—requiring that at least half the federal funds be obligated within four months of the grant— which prohibited other, potentially higher-priority projects from being selected for funding.

How was Florida able to accomplish this? A culture of maintenance helped, which allowed stimulus funding to go directly to new projects, and the Florida DOT has kept a backlog of priority projects that, though unfunded, had completed the planning and project development cycle. Projects involving new transit additions—rather than highways and roads—were not as well positioned because of the longer federal review cycle, more decentralized planning, and second thoughts by one locality and a new governor.

Of the $1.7 billion received by Florida through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) transportation stimulus package, $1.1 billion was for spending in Florida’s largest metropolitan regions—south Florida, Tampa Bay, central Florida, and Jacksonville.

Projects were divided among the FDOT, local transit operators, and the state’s regional metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs). FDOT oversaw $592 million in stimulus spending while local transit agencies oversaw $266 million, and the MPOs were responsible for selecting $223 million in projects.

FDOT’s 15 projects in 13 counties of these major regions consisted of road widenings, two new roads, the addition of electronic tolling to Florida’s Turnpike, and conversion of Interstate 95 carpool lanes to managed lanes that accommodate expanded transit, carpools, and solo drivers willing to pay a toll.

Culture of Maintenance

Florida’s culture of maintenance ensures that the first transportation dollars are spent on keeping infrastructure in a state of good repair. “We have no bridges falling down,” says Bob Clifford, executive director of the Tampa Bay Area Regional Transportation Authority. Florida is required by statute to maintain its bridges and roads in top condition. Two-thirds of the interstate highway system in Florida is rated by the Federal Highway Administration to be in the best condition, compared with only one-third of the nation’s interstates as a whole,and the percentage of bridges rated deficient in Florida is half the national average. States that have been less diligent typically prefer to use additional funding for repairs and deferred maintenance. In Florida, new money could go for new projects.

Keeping Projects on the Front Burner

Florida’s capability to handle new investments quickly was abetted by a backlog of shovel-ready projects. Like most states, Florida is strapped for revenues: Florida’s transportation funddepends primarily on gasoline taxes, which are capped by a legislature unwilling to raise rates. With rapid growth in Florida’s economy expected to follow a U.S. recovery, FDOT continued planning for needed projects, even without any prospects for immediate funding.

James Bennett, the urban transportation development manager for FDOT District 2, which includes Jacksonville, says that despite being perennially strapped for funding, his district, like others, “took steps in advance for right-of-way, environmental permits, and land acquisition, and took steps to have designers update ‘on-the-shelf plans’ and apply for permits.” Such planning in the face of financial difficulties gave FDOT a list of major projects expanding capacitythat wereable to meet the shovel-ready requirements of the federal stimulus funding program, whereas most other states were forced to resort to prosaic road-resurfacing projects.

Research for a study titled Stimulus Spending on Infrastructure in Florida: An Examination of More Than $1 Billion in Transportation Expenditures and the Lessons Learned, completed in 2011 for the Collins Center for Public Policy in Miami, examined the rationale for these expenditures and the lessons that can be drawn from the spending, with a special focus on regional development goals and disadvantaged communities.

For the large Florida regions studied, 30 percent of the project funding was assigned to projects bythe regional MPOs, and the remaining 70 percent went to FDOT, which selected projects with input from the MPOs. Although this approach requires more time to put in place, prompting criticism of slow implementation, it creates greater long-term value for the projects. Criteria used for selecting projects included congestion relief, promotion of economic development, and service of regional growth while protecting the economy and minority communities. However, the short-term commitments of the stimulus program allowed little flexibility in projects that had not been vetted already. The FDOT’s 15 major projects included at least one in each of the major counties in the large regions, and regional planners as well as business leaders agreed that these projects addressed the most critical needs.

Mixed Signals for Transit

Federal stimulus spending for local transit projects in these major regions amounted to $266 million, about half as much as what was spent on FDOT’s major road projects, with almost two-thirds—$170 million—spent in south Florida. Almost one-third of transportation stimulus dollars in the central and south Florida regions went for transit, a surprisingly large share compared with transit’s share of travel in these regions—3.5 percent in central Florida and under 2 percent in south Florida. In contrast with the low number of major highway projects targeted—which were highly centralized “off-the-shelf projects” carefully focused on major capacity additions—for transit, decisions were highly decentralized among agencies and funding widely dispersed among many short-term rehabilitation and maintenance projects.

Major transit projects must run a gauntlet of approval steps by the Federal Transit Administration, and no Florida projects were sufficiently advanced to be considered shovel ready. An initiative in Tampa to construct a light-rail line, which would have connected to the proposed Florida high-speed rail, was defeated at the ballot box. (“Regional Transit: Regrouping in the Tampa Bay Area,” May/June, page 80.)

The high-speed rail project was selected for 100 percent capital funding in a related U.S. Department of Transportation rail stimulus program, but in February 2011, Florida’s incoming governor killed the project, citing concerns over operating cost overruns that would be Florida’s responsibility. As a result, Florida’s transit stimulus, administered by a dozen different transit agencies serving these regions, was spent on near-term operational improvements, such as buses, garages, and technical upgrades rather than longer-term investments.

The study points out that in many Florida regions, “the metropolitan planning organizations divide, rather than unite, regions,” and that in these situations “the Florida DOT has the only truly regional perspective.”In Florida’s twomost populous regions, Tampa Bay and south Florida, MPOs are generally county based, whereas the FDOT districts incorporate virtually the entire regions, along with surrounding counties.Each FDOT district has its own staff and secretary and is increasingly sensitive to local growth and development issues (though they have no direct involvement in the local land use planning decisions that affect transportation/transit infrastructure needs). In contrast, the four-county Tampa–St. Petersburg metro region contains four MPOs and four transit agencies.

Lessons for Other States

Additional stimulus programs seem unlikely in the national political climate, although there is always the possibility of individual states embarking on significant short-term investments. What lessons can be learned from Florida’s experience?

Fix it first. This is a principle recognized among transportation practitioners as good practice, but a difficult sell in the political arena, which rewards ribbon cuttings over facilities maintenance.

Continue project development even when funding is scarce. This requires plans and project development, including obtaining necessary permits and land acquisition.

Keep a short list of priorities. FDOT worked closely with the regional agencies so that when it came time for putting a short list of projects together, all parties were in agreement.

This does not address the broader question of sustainable funding, an issue over which the U.S. Congress and most states are still conflicted. When and if there are breakthroughs on funding, however, it will be equally important to have effective plans and priorities in place to meet the transportation needs of the future. UL